NEW DELHI: Microsoft has seen higher rate of adoption of cloud services in the country after setting up local infrastructure and is now aiming for a market share of more than 40% in the next fiscal in this segment, a top company executive said.

The growth in cloud services has been driven by small and medium businesses (SMB) and startups, along with verticals like banking, financial services & insurance (BFSI), healthcare, ecommerce and the government sector, Bhaskar Pramanik, chairman for the company’s Indian unit, told ET.

“Cloud adoption is helped by the market itself, which has moved more to the cloud. We feel that we opened our data centres at the right time, and they acted as catalyst and further accelerated the trend. We are also seeing a move to Microsoft Azure,” Pramanik said.

Conglomerates like Reliance, Essar, L&T, Mahindra’s have also migrated to Microsoft’s cloud services. Further, the governments of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh are also using the company’s services.

“A number of ecommerce companies like Snapdeal, PepperFry, besides startups, which has been another phenomenal, have actually moved to the cloud,” he said.

The company has 150,000 customers in the SMB space, about 50,000 of whom are acquired, and most of them are SaaS (software as a service) customers.

Pramanik said usage is much higher in the SMB space than in large enterprise because they don’t want the hassle of owning large infrastructure.

As per an IDC report, Microsoft has 30% market share in the overall cloud business, including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. In the SaaS business, the company has a 46% share.